Product Description

Making smart choices is a fundamental life skill, relevant to anyone: managers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, parents, young, old. Your decisions will shape and influence the course of your professional career and the quality of your personal life--the ability to make good decisions is a key factor in determining whether you achieve your goals. To help you increase your chances of finding satisfying solutions, Smart Choices blends the art and science of decision making into a straightforward, proven approach for making tough choices. Smart Choices doesn't tell you what to decide; it tells you how. Authors Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa, among the world's best-known experts on resolving complex decision problems, blend the art and the science of decision making into accessible steps that lead you to consider your choices both intuitively and analytically. Here, for the first time, is a flexible system that can be applied to business decisions, to personal decisions, to family decisions--to any decision you make.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59817 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 244 pages

Synopsis
Making smart choices is a fundamental life skill, relevant to anyone: managers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, parents, young, old. Your decisions will shape and influence the course of your professional career and the quality of your personal life - the ability to make good decisions is a key factor in determining whether you achieve your goals. To help you increase your chances of finding satisfying solutions, "Smart Choices" blends the art and science of decision making into a straightforward, proven approach for making tough choices. "Smart Choices" doesn't tell you what to decide; it tells you how. Authors Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa, among the world's best-known experts on resolving complex decision problems, blend the art and the science of decision making into accessible steps that lead you to consider your choices both intuitively and analytically. Here, for the first time, is a flexible system that can be applied to business decisions, to personal decisions, to family decisions - to any decision you make.

About the Author
John S. Hammond is an internationally known decision-making consultant specializing in negotiation and corporate strategy, and a former professor at Harvard Business School.

Customer Reviews

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD TO BETTER DECISIONS
Smart Choices is one of the two best books I have read in the last year. First, because people have trouble making decisions, and second, because people usually make the wrong decisions. Smart Choices provides a yellow-brook-road to follow one step at a time to end up with the optimum decision. Optimizing decisions are much harder to reach than maximizing decisions because they do balance all elements. The PROACTive process works, I have used it. The other book I recommend you read along with Smart Choices is The 2,000 Percent Solution which explains why people are "stalled" and why they cannot make a good decision. Then it leads you through the Eight-Step Problem Solving Process to identify how to make decisions that result in 20 times the benefit or get there 20 times as fast or at 1/20th the cost. To become an expert decisions maker read both books. It's all you will need.

THE guide to decision-making
When I started reading this book, I was bored and disappointed with the examples. The process of decision making -- problem, objectives, alternatives, consequences, and tradeoffs -- seemed obvious. And the examples were silly: Should John and Jane Doe buy a house? I wasn't interested, but when I continued reading, some parts, such as the chapters about risk and uncertainty, grasped me. I also found that just enumerating the decision making process made it a lot easier. The PrOACT solution is very intelligent. Even if you've never heard of decision theory, you use the system. By quantifying it and understanding how you make decisions, you'll naturally become a better decision maker. You'll know that there are alternatives to eating the whole cheesecake, or what the real reason you're putting off that assignment is. I run a website, called the Wall Street Wizard, www.streetwhiz.com, and it's helped me craft a better, more perceptive site because of my decisions on a daily basis. And it can help you. One of the best decisions you'll make is to buy this book.

Put this one at the top of your reading list
I had the pleasure of reading this book last year as assigned material in a graduate business course taught by Ralph Keeney. My degree is in information systems management and, frankly, I took Managerial Decision Analysis only because I needed 3 elective credits to graduate. In retrospect, however, the course was among the most beneficial to me and Smart Choices was certainly the most relevant book I read in graduate school. I say it was the most relevant because it demonstrates how to define problems and make decisions not simply as a business leader, but as an individual. The PROACT approach is a valuable tool for making formal decisions like "Which career path should I choose?" or "Which software package should I recommend to my client?" But the mentality that the approach engenders is pervasive. You will find yourself unwittingly applying elements of it to questions like "How should I spend time with my kids this weekend?" or "What is the best Valentine's Day gift for my wife?" The greatest benefit to me has been the piece of mind that comes with knowing that I don't just make better decisions -- I am now a better decision maker.